Leviticus 27:5

Summary

Leviticus 27:5 sets the valuation price for persons aged five to twenty years dedicated by vow: twenty shekels for a male and ten shekels for a female.

Key words

• ben- ("a son of", H1121L) — construct form used idiomatically with a number to express age ("son of five years" = "five years old"), repeated for both boundaries of the age range.
• chaMesh ("five", H2568) — cardinal number marking the lower limit of the age bracket.
• haYah ("it will be", H1961) — qal sequential perfect (vav-consecutive), continuing the legal sequence begun in the preceding verses, establishing what "will be" the case once the age condition is met.
• 'erke- ("valuation of", H6187) — construct noun with second-person suffix (-kha, "your"), meaning "your valuation," the assessed price a valuer sets.
• neqeVah ("female", H5347) — feminine singular adjective functioning as a substantive, paired against ha-zaKhar ("the male", H2145) to distinguish the two valuations.

What the text says

The verse is structured as a conditional clause (ve'im, "and if") that specifies an age range using the idiom ben- + number + shanim ("son of X years"), a construction that literally means "a son of five years" for "five years old" and appears twice — once for the lower bound (five) and once for the upper bound (twenty). The clause introduced by ve'im... ve'ad ("and if... and to") sets the boundaries of applicability before the main clause begins.

The apodosis opens with ve-haYah ("and it will be"), a vav-consecutive perfect that signals the outcome once the age condition holds — this verb form ties the sentence to the sequence of valuations already established for other age groups earlier in the chapter. The noun 'erkekha ("your valuation") is a construct chain with a second-person suffix, indicating the price set by the one performing the assessment. The sentence then splits into two parallel statements distinguished by ha-zaKhar ("the male") and la-neqeVah ("for the female"), each assigned a numeral plus sheqaLim ("shekels", H8255): twenty for the male, ten for the female. The construct 'aSeret ("ten of", H6235) before sheqaLim mirrors the counting pattern used throughout the chapter for shekel amounts.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew explicitly repeats sheqaLim ("shekels") after both numbers (twenty shekels, ten shekels), while the Vulgate uses siclos only once, attaching it to the male's amount ("viginti siclos") and leaving the female's amount ("femina, decem") without repeating the unit, relying on the prior mention. The LXX excerpt given breaks off after "εἴκοσι" ("twenty"), showing only the male valuation without the female figure present in the provided fragment.